Administration & Operations: Overview
Building a service is half the story; running it is the other half. This module covers the day-2 concerns: the management surfaces, logging and monitoring, troubleshooting, and moving configuration between environments.
Management surfaces (recap + ops view)
- WebGUI — best for inspection, ad-hoc changes, and the built-in troubleshooting tools (probe, packet capture).
- CLI — scripting, precise control, and
write memoryto persist config. - REST management API — automation, health checks, and CI/CD pipelines.
What day-2 actually involves
| Concern | Covered in |
|---|---|
| Seeing what the gateway is doing | Logging & Monitoring |
| Finding out why a request failed | Troubleshooting |
| Promoting config dev → test → prod | Config Management |
| Persisting changes | Save Config / write memory (Module 2) |
| Health & capacity | Status providers, monitors, load balancer groups |
Health and status at a glance
DataPower exposes a large set of status providers (object op-state, CPU,
memory, connections, TLS, etc.) via the WebGUI, CLI (show ...), and REST. These
feed dashboards and alerting. The DataPower Operations Dashboard (DPOD) is a
companion product that aggregates logs, transactions, and metrics across many
gateways for centralised monitoring.
Operational habits worth forming
- Save deliberately. Know what's in running vs. persisted config before a restart (Module 2).
- Watch op-state, not just admin-state. "Enabled but down" is the most common false alarm.
- Mind certificate expiry. Expiring certs silently take services down.
- Automate promotion. Manual clicking doesn't scale or stay consistent — export/import with deployment policies does.
The following lessons are concise outlines you can expand with the linked IBM docs.
Knowledge Check
Which management surface is the right choice for automated, pipeline-driven operations and health checks?
What does the DataPower Operations Dashboard (DPOD) provide?